Repeated crashing

FlameGrilled

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I new here, but I hope that doesn't put you off listening to my woes!

I have a Shuttle XPC running XP Pro. The problem started last week when on boot up it would scan the disk and report hundreds of bad sectors (250G drive, ok shouldn't really have the OS and data on the same drive - that is something I am about to change!) If I ignored the disk check I could still get into the OS and most programs would work but some did ask to be installed again but wouldn't actually install. Cancelling was the only way to stop them.
Norton was run on Friday night and reported no faults. The only thing I have installed recently is XP updates.

Anyway, I decided a clean install was necessary, but on a different drive as I wasn't sure if the fault was software or hardware related.
Re-built onto an oldish 60g drive and installed XP Pro, Norton 2002 with all the updates, XP SP1, XP SP2 and all the windows updates currently available.
Yesterday the PC crashed after about 2 hours of use citing a Master Boot Failure (Joy!). So I reinstalled everything agian but this time on my newly formatted and working (apparently) 250 g drive (the one originally used). Got it back into the same state last night. This morning I switched it on and after 5 mins it crashed. This time citing a problem with c:\Windows\System32\Config\System.
I booted up with the XP CD in and tried a repair but I could even get a DIR reading of the C: drive!

I tried booting up with only one stick of RAM, then swapped them over to see if I had a RAM issue but the failure is still the same. I doubt I could be that unlucky and have 2 hard drives failing at once (hard drives that have been working perfectly) but odd things do happen. I am going to try installing again tonight but this time with the XP updates, just SP1 and SP2.

Anyone else got any ideas?

Paul
 
Get a new drive, but before you install it test your psu voltage.
FYI...installing sp2..you don't have to install sp1.



>>>edit By the way ...Welcome to the forums!!!
 
Not sure trying a new drive is going to do it as having 2 previously reliable drives fail within 24 hours has got to be rare (although not impossible!).
I have spoken with a colleage at work who does lots of PC builds and his opinion is that it could be a RAM problem as the error is consistanly there but is slightly every time. He has seen these things before so I'll give it a try. We have Dell's at work with the same DDR RAM so I'll borrow a stick from my test Pc at work over the weekend and give it a try!
If it works I'll have to buy some more RAM I guess. If not I'll buy a new HD. As 1G sticks are now around £75 I was thinking of upgrading anyway.

Thanks for the welcome buy the way :)

Paul
 
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